Do you think it would have replied to our confusion? If it hadn't been for the reloading bench bit, it would have been passable as a real human being, considering what is posted on steam discussion forums. Spam bots have always fascinated me... well, at least the interesting ones anyway. Do people set those up on the forums manually, or do the scripts just crawl the web looking for forums to post in?

Anyway, I think having a SHODAN esque uber-AI occasionally pop up, take over a (star)system, and turn the entire population (meaning the ships, not the NPC's themselves) of the system against you would make for a cool mod. Because you know. Flesh is weak.

That, or having ship computers act almost as VM's and expanding electronic warfare features, so one could "legit" hack into an enemy flagship and wreak havok. I'm tired of hacking "minigames". It would be nice to see something a bit more realistic, even if developing such a mod might not be the best of ideas and actually playing with said features might be a bit dry.

Graf wrote:
That, or having ship computers act almost as VM's and expanding electronic warfare features, so one could "legit" hack into an enemy flagship and wreak havok. I'm tired of hacking "minigames". It would be nice to see something a bit more realistic, even if developing such a mod might not be the best of ideas and actually playing with said features might be a bit dry.

How do you envision this working?

I envision a command prompt with access to every ship in the region. Some or all ships would have open "ports" that can be entered and procedural passwords that are some how hidden in the computer's network information. Finding the password is the challenge and it gives root access to the NPC's ship information and possible control. I know ThymineC made a lengthy post about hacking, but some new ideas on the subject would be neat.

crews and boarding pods.
first of all, people are quantized. you could for example have 2500 crewmen, 100 marines, and 15 officers (not sure what officers would do, but eh, one could always find some stat they affect)
every ship would have a crew, and the more you have the better the ship operates. there is a minimum crew requirement for any actions at all, like movement or even cargo transfer.
you can overcrew your ships to gain a little bonus in certain areas, like turret tracking speed or scanning speed or whatever, but overcrewing gives extremely little profit compared to investment.

crews could need food and pay, but at the most basic level they would be a comodity to be bought.
you can loose your crew in several ways, for starters you could loose an entire ship. you can also get boarded and have your guys loose. you can have your ships partially destroyed, once your ship has lost a certain amount of health (50% for example) you start loosing crew. as your ship gets more and more damaged it also starts to loose efficiency with what it has left.

boarding pods: basically people missiles. not much to say here, you fire them and if they hit they deposit some amount of marines and they start rolling dice like mad under the hood. a marine is WAY better than a regular crewman when it comes to fighting, so only a small ammount of marines could cripple, if not capture a ship. (note, if you wipe out a crew you would need to get some of your crew to it to actually control it, as your marine force presumably is smaller than the minimum crew requirement. that means we need to be able to select what crew we launch in our people missiles).

a small ship like a fighter or bomber would have a small crew like 1-4 while large ship crews would be in the thousands, or even tens of thousands depending on size and role

and when you dont have an approbiate officier the respective system doesnt work.
or doesnt have detailed controls
for example if you dont have a shield officier you cant control your shields besides primitive on/off switching.

for bigger ships you may need multiple officiers per system, as they get more complex.
and there could be different "access" classes for the amounts of officiers you have on a system.
so on a big ship you dont have fine control besides on/off for shields if you have less than 1/5th of the officier requirements for them.

general crew could affect the general working condition of equipment, officiers its "intelligence" or control detail.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:general crew could affect the general working condition of equipment, officiers its "intelligence" or control detail.

I'd go with that.

Unless you want to build a detailed simulation (which would definitely be fun for some folks), for a general game I tend to favor "works at a default effectiveness but improves with attention" over "doesn't work at all unless assigned specific resources and watched like a hawk." With a functional default, people can start having fun immediately, but the game still lets them become more effective as they dedicate more playing time and knowledge to it.

basic game systems should always work without any extra magic (flying around, managing your own basic ship functions etc)

but advanced mechanics should be able to break if handled incorrectly.

so for example if jumpgates cant be turned off "just so" and malfunction catastrophically if mishandled (explodes, creates temporary black hole that destroyes a few ships before vanishing etc)
or if the energy transmitter of an orbital solar power plant gets mishandled and fries the city it was supposed to supply.

things that can do powerful things should be able to backfire if handled without care.

basic game systems should always work without any extra magic (flying around, managing your own basic ship functions etc)

but advanced mechanics should be able to break if handled incorrectly.

Sure. Power and responsibility should go together, in games as well as in most other human experiences.

In a game, if interactions with complex systems can have successful outcomes with no need for thoughtful decision-making, then it's not much of a game; it's mostly just button-mashing and knob-twiddling.

I do think there's a reasonable balance to be drawn between "breaking" and "working better." Racing around just keeping a system from falling apart is one kind of thoughtful gameplay -- designing strategies and implementing them with tactical effectiveness to create something new is a different kind of thoughtful gameplay. The balance between these two kinds of better-than-default gameplay will play a large role in determining the feel of the game.